• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This particular salvo from Dave apparently got under Jay’s skin enough for him to return fire the following night with as aggressive an attack on Dave as he had ever launched in public. At the top of his monologue Jay turned to his bandleader, Kevin Eubanks, to note how the show had been appearing in the press every day—and how Letterman, especially, had been hammering him every night.

“Hey, Kev, you know the best way to get Letterman to ignore you?” Jay asked.

“No, what?” Eubanks replied.

“Marry him! He will not bother you! He won’t look you in the eye!”

The well-crafted joke drew an enormous laugh, though it would also generate an unusual amount of backlash against Jay among some (including, later, Oprah Winfrey) who thought the gag crossed a taste boundary, because it dragged a civilian—Dave’s obviously hurt wife—into the battle.

(Jay later defended the joke as being both [a] funny and [b] the only time he really went after Dave during the entire January late-night convulsion. The latter point was not precisely true, however; Jay had sprinkled a number of other Dave-centric jokes into his routines, such as “Remember the more innocent days of late-night TV, when the only thing people cared about was which intern the host was nailing? What happened to that? What happened to those days?” And later in the week of the “marry him” joke, Jay did a bit with guest Chelsea Handler, pretending to be putting the moves on her by taking her to a sleazy motel, where he plugged in a vibrating bed and said, “Actually, I got this idea from Letterman.”)

Perhaps because of the backlash from his one pointed Jay joke, Conan did not join Letterman in any Leno bashing as he started what was now virtually certain to be his last week at NBC. He had never really engaged in personal invective—even when his anger was at a peak after what had transpired—and he wasn’t about to change that now.

Instead Conan and his writers came up with one inspired idea after another to express their outrage—and to tap into the outrage of his fans. He first put The Tonight Show up for sale on Craigslist (“Guaranteed to last for up to seven months; designed for 11:35, but can easily be moved!”) and then himself (“Tall, slender redhead available for nighttime recreation; currently homeless, must meet at your place”).

Then they came up with a plan to make it look as though they were spending outrageous amounts of NBC’s money during the show’s last days on the air. “We’re going to introduce comedy bits that are not so much funny as they are crazy expensive,” Conan declared. One night they tricked up a Bugatti Veyron (supposedly the most expensive car in the world) with mouse ears while playing the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—music rights being notoriously costly, especially if a clip containing the music is downloaded over and over online—a bit that Conan announced would cost NBC $1.5 million. The next night they brought on the alleged Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird, decked the nag out in a mink Snuggie, and let him watch restricted Super Bowl clips. Price tag: $4.8 million. On his finale, Conan went all out with an absurdly mobile fossil of a rare ground sloth spraying Beluga caviar on an original Picasso. That one cost $65 million, Conan proclaimed.

But a minute later he felt compelled to explain that all these had been comedy bits. Credulous folks all over the Web (and some even in the press) had been either celebrating this act of sticking it to The Man or decrying this horrifyingly wasteful extravagance in a battered economy, not understanding it was all a gag. (The Bugatti was on loan from a museum; the horse was not actually Mine That Bird; the Snuggie wasn’t mink; the Picasso and the caviar weren’t real.)

Conan continued to pound NBC in his monologues, but he also made fun of his own situation:

“It’s been a busy day for me today. I spent the afternoon at Universal Studios’ amusement park, enjoying their brand-new ride, the ‘Tunnel of Litigation.